poetry

Bones Will Crow

On a rooftop
Under the moon
My soul sits like an aristocrat
While my body rests
In a dimly lit corner.
—Aung Cheimt

“An illuminating account of real Myanmar narrated by uncensored and often deviant Burmese, who dare to dream and challenge the norms. Myanmar Studies scholars and literature fans often lament the lack of authentic Burmese voices in print, accessible to the world outside Burma. Bones will Crow not only fills this gap but also presents the readers a counter-narrative of 'exotic' Burma often associated with golden pagodas and smiling faces. Daily struggles under crony capitalism, confronting commercialization of female bodies, an exile's homesickness, issues Burmese grapple with leap out of the pages of this anthology. This anthology is a long overdue, much-welcomed addition.” —Tharapi Than, PhD, Teaching Fellow and Lector in Burmese (University of London)

This is the first anthology of contemporary Burmese poets published in the West, and includes the work of Burmese poets who have been in exile and in prison. The poems include global references from a culture in which foreign books and the internet are regarded with suspicion and where censorship is an industry. The poets have been ingenious in their use of metaphor to escape surveillance and censorship, writing post-modern, avant-garde, performance and online poetries. Through their wildly diverse styles, these poems delight in the freedom to experiment with poetic tradition.

“A highly-anticipated anthology of 15 diverse Burmese poets spanning several generations, whose contribution to the continual fight against the suppression of democracy and free speech is even more necessary now. These poets are essential reading for the wider world for their historical perspective and experimental approaches to poetry and poetics.” —Poetry Review

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Negative Space

Shortlist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize

“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania.

For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman— the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl atop her shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, much as a child might discover a world in a grain of sand.

“Lleshanaku’s work is so full of life and vivid detail that it rings with hope and a revivifying ambition.” —The Poetry Review

Lleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor.” —Poetry Nation Review

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Guyana Memories

Dr. Hanif Gulmahamad was born in 1945 on a British colonial sugar plantation growing up in a small cottage on the Springlands Sugar Estate. He later emigrated to the US to attend university graduating with honors returning to his homeland for a single year to teach at the University of Guyana before permanently moving back to the US.

This book showcases 4 short stories, 11 works of nonfiction, and 48 poems of his. Some are of historical Guyanese significance that have previously been unrecorded and could well have been lost in the passage of time if not for this collection. Some pieces focus on local culture in Guyana—hunting birds with slingshots, crafting kites , catching fish at No. 73 waterside, and the notorious fowl thieves of the village. A few pieces represent the new Guyanese diaspora.

“A sentimental journey of the author's recollections of his boyhood in Guyana [evoking] the innocent and simple way of life in a long ago and far away land before moving to the US. Interesting, nostalgic, funny, sad, and thought-provoking.” —Guyanese Online

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Colaterales/Collateral

A winner of the prestigious poetry award named for the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz—in a special bilingual edition featuring English and Spanish translations.

These poems were written during days spent clearing river debris while living along the Hudson River in Manhattan after moving from Venezuela. However, the global perspective is clearly shown with poems that speak of the wanderings of a nomadic subject who erases and rewrites in an imaginary landscape.

The Paz Prize for Poetry is presented by the National Poetry Series and The Center at Miami Dade College. This annual award—named in the spirit of the late Nobel Prize–winning poet, Octavio Paz—honors a previously unpublished book of poetry written originally in Spanish by an American resident.

“Di Donato's poetry exhibits a tremendous control of language...She is both ancient and contemporary. . . a vital poet who honors the memory of Octavio Paz.” —Victor Hernández Cruz

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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The Secret of Hoa Sen

Winner of the Poetry of the Year Award from the Hanoi Writers Association

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is among the most exciting writers to emerge from post-war Vietnam. The Secret of Hoa Sen shines with craft, art, and deeply felt humanity. These penetrating poems, published in bilingual English and Vietnamese, build new bridges between two cultures bound together by war and destruction.

“Born in 1973 in Vietnam’s north but raised in the south’s lush delta, award-winning poet Nguyễn writes precise, vibrant poems that give voice to her country’s present, grounded in tradition and dark history.” —Library Journal

“Nguyễn writes eloquently about family, femaleness and the sensual beauty of her country. When she writes of place, I feel that I am walking past the rice shoots in a long ago world.” —Omaha World-Herald

“Nguyễn's poetic attention is diverse and wide in scope, but never far from her country and family... one cannot help but feel that each poem is written into the Vietnamese landscape of the poet’s imagination. Not carved, but delicately inscribed; so as to preserve the beauty of a country whose wounds must not define it.” —Poetry International

“My Mother’s Rice

Through the eyes of my childhood I watch my mother,
who labored in a kitchen built from straw and mud.
She lifted a pair of chopsticks and twirled sunlight into a pot of boiling rice,
the perfume of a new harvest
soaked her worn shirt as she bent and fed rice straws to the hungry flames.
I wanted to come and help, but the child in me
pulled myself into a dark corner
where I could watch my mother’s face
teach beauty how to glow in hardship,
and how to sing the rice to cook with her sunbaked hands.

That day in our kitchen
I saw how perfection was arranged
by soot-blackened pans and pots,
and by the bend back of my mother, so thin
she would disappear if I wept, or cried out.”

Austerity Measures

A remarkable collection of poetic voices from contemporary Greece, Austerity Measures is a one-of-a-kind window into the creative energy that has arisen from the country’s decade of crisis and a glimpse into what it is like to be Greek today.

The 2008 debt crisis shook Greece to the core and went on to shake the world. More recently, Greece has become one of the main channels into Europe for refugees from poverty and war. Greece stands at the center of today’s most intractable conflicts, and this situation has led to a truly extraordinary efflorescence of innovative and powerfully moving Greek poetry. Karen Van Dyck’s wide-ranging bilingual anthology—which covers the whole contemporary Greek poetry scene, from literary poets to poets of the spoken word to poets online, and more—offers an unequaled sampling of some of the richest and most exciting poetry of our time.

“It was no more than two or three poems in before I started to sense the book’s atmosphere, to see it as an uncommon chance to share Greek experience beyond the headlines—in a way that is fascinating, revelatory and only possible through poetry. Most poems here do not overtly address the crisis. But the collective spirit is new-minted, unmediated and bracing (the quality of translation high).” —The Observer

“The light these poets work in, and the language they speak, are still the light and the language of Homer and the great tragedians. The wonderfully inventive translations reveal a different Greece to English readers: one that does not cancel the past but builds upon it.” —Ruth Padel, award-winning British poet and author

(Group read suggestion from Julie Jacobs, book club moderator.)

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Diaries of Exile

Winner of the 2014 PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation

Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this volume, which presents a series of three diaries in poetry that Ritsos wrote between 1948 and 1950, during and just after the Greek Civil War, while a political prisoner first on the island of Limnos and then at the infamous camp on Makronisos.

Even in this darkest of times, Ritsos dedicated his days to poetry, trusting in writing and in art as collective endeavors capable of resisting oppression and bringing people together across distance and time. These poems offer glimpses into the daily routines of life in exile, the quiet violence Ritsos and his fellow prisoners endured, the fluctuations in the prisoners’ sense of solidarity, and their struggle to maintain humanity through language. This moving volume justifies Ritsos’s reputation as one of the truly important poets in Greece’s modern literary history.

From this collection:

“Smooth-cheeked kid uncombed unwashed
at morning call with clouds for company
dark red sweater unbuttoned pants
still sleepy - a scrap of sleep melting in his hair
a rembetika song in his pocket
I’ll comb you, I’ll wash you, I’ll tighten your belt
I’ll take back all the words they took from me
the words no one knows to give me
the words I can’t ask for”
— December 5

(Group read suggestion from Julie Jacobs, book club moderator.)

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The Folding Star and Other Poems

Nominated for the Nike Award, the Cogito Award, & the Gdynia Award.

In his triumphant collection, The Folding Star and Other Poems, poet of the imagination Jacek Gutorow offers thirty-one gems that will help change our understanding of Polish poetry.

“His poems are meditative and beautiful, his diction fragile and clear...In short, it is a lovely book.” —Hey Small Press

“The ability of poetry to deal with nearly any topic and to tell little stories encapsulated in a few lines has long been a tradition of the Poles and an area they’ve displayed exceptional expertise. Gutorow has placed himself strongly within this tradition but in the most contemporary sense.” ―Gently Read Literature

From this collection:

“I fell in love with language again this evening.
The excess of reality had left me stranded.
The stairs with littered with phrases and headwind.
The clock struck reticent midnight.
I roamed from the forest of nouns to the valley of adverbs
and even farther, to the vast plateau of pronouns.
There, in a building of gold-yellow walls (matte latex),
mallows and loudly climbing roses were in charge.
Tracks like phrases that turn back upon themselves.
A beach was put together with a few words that hurt the eyes
with dirty foam. In the western sky a streak left behind by a rickety jet
and its commas beginning to fray.
But that was earlier,
before I again fell in love with language
that stood there mute in the wind.”

Exotic Territory

An exceptional anthology of award-winning poets, Exotic Territory seeks to address a dearth of information in the English-speaking world about Paraguayan poetry. The twelve outstanding poets included here—José Luis Appleyard, Moncho Azuaga, Gladys Carmagnola, Susy Delgado, Oscar Ferreiro, Renée Ferrer, Joaquín Morales, Amanda Pedrozo, Jacobo Rauskin, Elvio Romero, Ricardo de La Vega, Carlos Villagra Marsal—represent a wide diversity of themes, styles, and perspectives in this little-known nation.

The majority of these poets have published extensively, have been recognized through literary awards and inclusion in national/international anthologies, and continue writing today.

To contextualize the poets and their poetry for readers unfamiliar with Paraguay, the introduction provides a brief background of its geography, history, government, economy, society, and artistic milieu. Following that is a wide selection of representative poems published previously in Spanish, with translations in English on facing pages. The book concludes with a brief biographical sketch of each poet, followed by an unprecedented and extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources intended to encourage those readers who might want to pursue further reading or research on any poet of interest.

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)

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First Person Sorrowful

Ko Un has long been a living legend in Korea, both as a poet and as a person. Allen Ginsberg once wrote, “Ko Un is a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian.”

When a writer has published as much as Ko Un has in the course of more than fifty years of writing, it is hard to know where to begin, what to translate. For this collection, his translators have selected a hundred or so poems from the five collections published since 2002, collections acclaimed by Korean critics as bringing poetry to a new level of cosmic reference. Nothing shows more clearly his stature as a writer than the variety of themes and emotions found in his most recent work. Readers here have access for the first time to many of the poems Ko Un has produced in the 21st century, as he approaches his eightieth year, his energy and originality unabated.

As Michael McLure wrote years ago: “Ko Un's poetry has the old-fashionedness of a muddy rut on a country road after rain, and yet it is also as state-of-the-art as a DNA micro-chip.” That remains true today.

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No Flower Blooms without Wavering

Do Jong-Hwan is one of Korea’s most beloved poets. Through his poetry, Do Jong-Hwan depicts nature and beauty interwoven with a touch of melancholy and hope. He offers glimpses of wisdom with lessons learned from life’s greatest joys and deepest pains. This explains why so many people appreciate them—for the courage the poems give when life is difficult, when joy seems far away.

Where have flowers bloomed but never trembled?
Even those most beautiful
all trembled as they blossomed,
and as they shook, stalks grew firm.
Where is there a love which is never shaken?

Where have flowers bloomed though never been made wet?
Even those most brightly sparkling
were soaked and soaked again as they blossomed.
Battered by wind and rain, their petals opened warmly.
Where is there a life which has never been drenched?

The poet lost his wife at a young age to cancer and the love, pain, and sadness he feels is also seen in this beautiful collection.

Today there is
no sign of you,
who turned into a star
and lingered a while
outside the window

Critics and readers alike adore Do Jong-Hwan and this collection of his best poems make it clear why he’s so beloved. This new publication offers the additional advantage of being bilingual, so that readers also have access to the original texts of the poems.

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Narrow Road to the Interior

Here is the most complete single-volume collection of the writings of one of the great luminaries of Asian literature. Basho (1644–1694)—who elevated the haiku to an art form of utter simplicity and intense spiritual beauty—is best known in the West as the author of Narrow Road to the Interior, a travel diary of linked prose and haiku that recounts his journey through the far northern provinces of Japan. This volume includes a masterful translation of this celebrated work along with three other less well-known but important works by Basho: Travelogue of Weather-Beaten Bones, The Knapsack Notebook, and Sarashina Travelogue. There is also a selection of over two hundred fifty of Basho's finest haiku. In addition, the translator has provided an introduction detailing Basho's life and work and an essay on the art of haiku.

Note: A variety of different translations are available with this version translated by Sam Hamill recommended as the best.

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The Flowers of Evil

“Les Flers du Mal, translated as The Flowers of Evil (first published in 1857), originally condemned as obscene, is recognized as a masterpiece, especially remarkable for the brilliant phrasing, rhythm, and expressiveness of its lyrics. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was one of the greatest French poets of the 19th century. His work has been a major influence on Western poetry and modern poetry in general as, thematically, he was one of the first poets whose subject was often urban life and its dark side, with all of its evils and the degradation of its temptations.

His poems, classical in form, introduced Symbolism, he is also known as a writer of the Decadent group. Baudelaire was moody and rebellious, imbued with an intense religious mysticism, and his work reflects an unremitting inner despair. His main theme is the inseparable nature of beauty and corruption.

The Flowers of Evil is a volume of French poetry that was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The subject matter of these poems deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism. The author and the publisher were prosecuted under the regime of the Second Empire as an an insult to public decency. As a consequence of this prosecution, Baudelaire was fined 300 francs.

Six poems from the work were suppressed and the ban on their publication was not lifted in France until 1949. Upon reading The Swan, Victor Hugo announced that Baudelaire had created a new shudder, a new thrill in literature.”

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Map

“Both plain-spoken and luminous…Szymborska’s skepticism, her merry, mischievous irreverence and her thirst for the surprise of fresh perception make her the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. Hers is the best of the Western mind—free, restless, questioning.” - NY Times Book Review

One of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.” But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death. Of the approximately 250 poems included, nearly 40 are newly translated; 13 represent the entirety of the poet’s last collection never before published in English.

“Nobel laureate Szymborska’s gorgeous posthumous collection interweaves insights into the suffering experienced during WWII and the Cold War brutalities of Stalin with catchy, realistic, colloquial musings. Her poems are revelatory yet rooted in the everyday. She writes about living with horrors, and about ordinary lives: people in love, at work, enjoying a meal. This is a brilliant and important collection.” - Booklist

"Szymborska has her impressive poetic repertoire on full display in this volume [which] reveals her development over seven decades, including a gradual departure from end rhyme and the sharpening of her wit. As multitudinous as Whitman, she conveyed deep feeling through vivid, surreal imagery and is able to revive clichéd language by reconnecting it in startling ways. Odes, critiques, and persona poems are just a few of the forms her writing took. Yet, despite their diversity, the constants of her poems were nuance and observational humor. Also apparent is Szymborska’s rare ability to present an epiphany in a single line.” - Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review

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The Shining Light

“Poetry has always been in the Kazakh blood, and Galym Mutanov is one of the newly independent nation’s leading poets, a shining light in the Kazakh literary world. In the range of his poetry, Mutanov truly captures the essence of the Kazakh spirit – from the tough and ageless traditions of the wild steppe to moments of tender intimacy. The measured Islamic wisdom and deep sense of morality so intrinsic to Kazakh life of old shines through in verse after verse.

The figure of Abai, the 19th century visionary, the deeply spiritual poet of the steppe, looms large over Kazakh poetry. Mutanov takes up the challenge that Abai threw down – to create verse that is both steeped in the Kazakh tradition of oral verse yet rises to a new clarity and spirituality relevant today.

Mutanov wrote originally in Kazakh, but many Kazakhs speak only Russian. So his poems were translated into Russian by leading poets Vladimir Buryazev and M. Adibaeva. It is these Russian versions that provided the source for John Farndon’s translations with Olga Nakston for this collection.

A Kazakh poet Galymkair Mutanov is not only an interesting and gifted creative personality, but also a very original, distinctive philosopher. His poems are heartfelt, extraordinary and modest. The poems are the memories, reflections and advice of a truly wise and outstanding person. They are not trivial and vain, but really bright, with deep philosophical associations.

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Mesopotamia

“A unique work of fiction from the troubled streets of Ukraine, giving invaluable testimony to the new history unfolding in the nation’s post-independence years

This captivating book is Serhiy Zhadan’s ode to Kharkiv, the traditionally Russian-speaking city in Eastern Ukraine where he makes his home. A leader among Ukrainian post-independence authors, Zhadan employs both prose and poetry to address the disillusionment, complications, and complexities that have marked Ukrainian life in the decades following the Soviet Union’s collapse. His novel provides an extraordinary depiction of the lives of working-class Ukrainians struggling against an implacable fate: the road forward seems blocked at every turn by demagogic forces and remnants of the Russian past. Zhadan’s nine interconnected stories and accompanying poems are set in a city both representative and unusual, and his characters are simultaneously familiar and strange. Following a kind of magical-realist logic, his stories expose the grit and burden of stalled lives, the universal desire for intimacy, and a wistful realization of the off-kilter and even perverse nature of love.”

(Group read suggestion from Mia DeGiovine Chaveco, book club co-founder.)

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Isla Negra

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the International Peace Prize, & the Lenin Peace Prize, Pablo Neruda remains one of the most influential voices in world literature.

“Few writers are as integrally bound to a place as Pablo Neruda was to the landscape of Isla Negra on Chile’s coast. From his arrival there in the late 1930s to his death in 1973 [from what is suspected to be poisoning by the Chilean military dictatorship], Neruda captured Isla Negra in words fundamental to an understanding of his work. It was at Isla Negra where Neruda ‘in the company of his muse, walked alongside the source of his most lyrical inspiration, the sea...and discovered a new way of seeing, as the ocean became a living metaphor for the infinite riches of the world.’”

Neruda’s imagery with words is sublime & this slim volume will make you long to live along the coastline. Neruda has been referred to as the “greatest poet of the 20th century in any language” & is recognized as one of the 26 authors that make up the Western canon of literature along with the likes of Jane Austen, Dante, Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, & Borges among others.

Note: The book voted to be read by the club was a thriller/mystery/historical fiction novel about this poet. Since a number of book club members also wanted to read this poetry, it’s a short volume, & reviewers have noted the novel is best accompanied by the poet’s work, both this volume of poetry above & the novel are included as the monthly read. (Members can read either or both.)

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Transparent City

A Vanity Fair “Hot Type” book, A Globe and Mail best book of 2018, a Lit Hub favorite book of the year, a World Literature Today notable translation, & winner of the José Saramago Prize

“Darkly pretty...peppered with poetry...These disparate stories are woven into a beautiful narrative that touches on government corruption, the privatization of water, the dangers of extracting oil for wealth, and the bastardization of religion for profit.. The novel reads like a love song to a tortured, desperately messed-up city that is undergoing remarkable transformations." - Publishers Weekly

“In a crumbling apartment block in the Angolan city of Luanda, families work, laugh, scheme, and get by. In the middle of it all is the melancholic Odonato, nostalgic for the country of his youth and searching for his lost son. As his hope drains away and as the city outside his doors changes beyond all recognition, Odonato’s flesh becomes transparent and his body increasingly weightless. A captivating blend of magical realism, scathing political satire, tender comedy, and literary experimentation, Transparent City offers a gripping and joyful portrait of urban Africa quite unlike any before yet published in English, and places Ondjaki, indisputably, among the continent’s most accomplished writers.”

(A special thank you to book club member, Carol Weldon for the suggestion.)

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Nefertiti in the Flak Tower

“Clive James’ power as a poet has increased year by year, and there has been no stronger evidence for this than Nefertiti in the Flak Tower. Here, his polymathic learning and technical virtuosity are worn more lightly than ever; the effect is merely to produce a deep sense of trust into which the reader gratefully sinks, knowing they are in the presence of a master. The most obvious token of that mastery is the book’s breathtaking range of theme: there are moving elegies, a meditation on the later Yeats, a Hollywood Iliad, odes to rare orchids, wartime typewriters and sharks—as well as a poem on the fate of Queen Nefertiti in Nazi Germany. But despite the dizzying variety, James’ poetic intention becomes increasingly clear: what marks this collection out is his intensified concentration on the individual poem as self-contained universe. Poetry is a practice he compares (in ‘Numismatics’) to striking new coin; and Nefertiti in the Flak Tower is a treasure-chest of one-off marvels, with each poem a twin-sided, perfect human balance of the unashamedly joyous and the deadly serious, ‘whose play of light pays tribute to the dark’.”

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The Promise of Hope

Slain in a terrorist attack in Kenya, Awoonor did not live to see this final volume of his published, but his spirit endures through his verse which combines the poetic traditions of his native Ewe people of Ghana & contemporary symbolism to depict Africa during decolonization.

"Kofi Awoonor, one of Ghana’s most accomplished poets, had for almost half a century committed himself to teaching, political engagement, and the literary arts. The one constant that guided and shaped his many occupations and roles in life was poetry. The Promise of Hope is a beautifully edited collection of some of Awoonor’s most arresting work spanning almost fifty years. 

Selected and edited by Awoonor’s friend and colleague Kofi Anyidoho, himself a prominent poet and academic in Ghana, The Promise of Hope contains much of Awoonor’s most recent unpublished poetry, along with many of his anthologized and classic poems."

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